The Devil’s Laughter

by Frank Yerby

  “Don’t, Jeannot, for God’s love don’t speak! They will only kill you too, and I could not bear that! Please, Jeannot, please, please, please!”

  He brought his hands up to unclamp her fierce fingers, but he could not tear them away from his mouth. And suddenly it was all too much, the realisation of his own weakness, the sight of that sublime woman below, guilty at worst of a certain amount of normal folly, being hounded to death by the worst pack of scoundrels who ever disgraced the name of humanity, so that the great knot of sickness and disgust and shame, the feeling of shared guilt inside his heart, burst like a torn wound, and the great tears splashed over Nicole’s hands.

  She released him and stepped back; but he didn’t make an outcry or say anything, but sat there, a great, broken hulk of a man weeping quietly with an anguish that was real and terrible and absolutely impossible to bear.

  Pierre nodded to Claude Bethune. The two of them caught hold of the wheel-chair and pushed him out of the gallery, bumping him down the long flight of stairs, so that each of the twenty-three red, freshly healed scars stabbed him anew, and he, loose against the chair, his head lolling upon his neck, the unashamed tears pencilling his scarred face, took again the indignity of his helplessness without a murmur of complaint, knowing these things to be nothing, and less than nothing, compared with the big, the terrible, the insufferable pain inside his heart.

  He was home again, and in bed, with Fleurette bathing his face, before a vagrant oddity of the morning came to his attention.

  Jeannot, he thought—Nicole called me Jeannot. I wonder if she’s beginning to remember?

  It was two weeks before he was able to leave his bed again. And it was good that this was so. Of October 16, he heard only the noise and shouting in the streets. Fleurette and Marianne stayed with him, but Pierre went, drawn by the subtle fascination of horror to the former Place Louis XV, become now the Place de la Revolution, the statue of Louis XV pulled down and a huge plaster figure of Liberty set up in its place, through the thirty thousand foot and horse drawn up in double rows to prevent insurrection, waiting there in the dense-packed crowds, seeing and hearing all the elements of tragedy, of drama, become commonplaces: the high, two-wheeled cart creaking through the crowd, the tricoteuses, the knitting women, sitting about the scaffold, counting the fall of heads without dropping a stitch, the drum-rolls, great Samson waiting by the infernal machine of the merciful Doctor Guillotin, and the cart finally appearing across the bridge from the Ile de la Cite and the grim Conciergerie, and she sitting there, dressed in white, her hands tied behind her like a common criminal.

  She looked very tired and very old, her hair snow-white now, despite her mere thirty-eight years; but enwrapped all the same in majesty, in dignity so complete, so serene, that it cut off from her the rabble, the screaming, the shouting, the obscenities roared at her, as though they had never been. They knew, after a time, that they could not reach her, which enraged them so that they redoubled their efforts. Beside her, on the cart, the constitutional priest in lay clothes stood, mumbling Latin, but she ignored him with a contempt that was absolute, holding him schismatic, traitor to her faith, dirt, and less.

  She mounted the scaffold with a firm step. Samson bound her to the plank. Pierre saw only part of the rest of it, for at the roar of Vive la République! he glanced once quickly at the dripping thing that Samson was holding high so that the mob might see, and moved away through the crowd, his whole body shaking with loathing and disgust.

  So died Marie Antoinette, Queen of France. For with all their Widow Capets, and Austrian Tigress, and other less printable epithets, they could not take that away from her. Queen she was, and remained; and never was she more queenly than upon the day of her dying.

  By the first week in November, Jean was up and about, walking with the aid of a stout stick. He was well now. A certain weakness lingered; but that, time and care would cure. What nothing would cure was his horror of idleness.

  He walked through the streets at all hours, taking upon himself the endless, day-long search for bread, going from one quartier to another—sometimes accompanied by Claude Bethune, who, like Jean, had had his business cut from under him by the Revolution—but usually alone, which he preferred, in the hope of finding enough loaves for Pierre, Marianne, Fleurette and himself. For it was not the lack of money that troubled them chiefly, but the dearth of supplies; assignats, or even gold, when there was no bread to be had, made a most insubstantial diet.

  He took his place that morning at the end of the long line standing before the baker’s shop. He was aware that probably long before he reached the door all the bread would be sold. Still, one had to chance things like that, and it was much better for him to do it than to send Fleurette to suffer the shoving and buffeting of the hungry crowd.

  He didn’t have to wait long. The baker appeared before half the crowd had reached his door.

  “No more, mes enfants!” he said pleadingly, “believe me, there is no more!”

  An angry mutter ran through the crowd. Jean Paul caught the words “Hoarder! Aristocrat!” “All the bakers have become aristocrats!” a woman cried.

  “My children!” the baker half wept, “come, see for yourselves! The store is empty. Search my house if you will! My own wife and children weep from hunger! I would bake more loaves if I had the wheat!” His face was red with anger suddenly.

  “Go there and search for your hoarders!” he cried. “Lantern those who let the grain come into Paris in trickles, and that of bad quality! Hang them, not your neighbour and your friend who has lived among you all these years!”

  “He has right,” a man said. “Alors, good François, try to have some bread for us tomorrow.”

  “That I will,” the baker said; “but come early, mes pauvres—I cannot promise to supply you all—only the first ones here can get the bread.”

  The crowd melted away, muttering. Jean turned to continue his endless search for one baker in Paris who might have a mouldy loaf to sell him, when he saw Nicole coming towards him, clutching a precious flute, as the long loaves were called, to her bosom.

  “Come, Jean,” she said, “walk me home, and you can have half, no, three-quarters for your family—as you have the greater need. With you at my side they won’t dare snatch it away from me. I’ve been robbed of bread twice already this week.”

  Jean fell into step beside her, putting much of his weight upon his stick. Nicole stepped lightly along, glancing at him out of the corner of her blue eyes. When they reached the miserable tenement in which she and her husband lived, she turned to him, smiling.

  “Come up with me, Jean,” she said.

  “Is Claude at home?” Jean demanded.

  “No. He has left Paris—to try his luck elsewhere. He has gone back to Provence—to Marseilles, to see if he cannot begin again far from the eye of these monsters here in Paris.”

  Jean shuddered, thinking of the news from the Midi and Provence. The Republican armies were putting down the good people of the Vendée and the Côte (both of which had revolted against the Government), with every refinement of cruelty. In Marseilles even the guillotine had proved too slow; there, and in Lyons, the Republicans were using massed fusillades to slaughter two hundred people at a volley.

  “No, Nicole,” he said, “I will not come up.”

  “Is it,” she whispered, “because I called you—Jeannot, that time before the Tribunal? I don’t know why I said that, but once I did, I knew I had said it before—a thousand, thousand times before. . . . ‘Tis that I used to call you, is it not?”

  “Yes,” Jean growled.

  “Jean—Jeannot—please come up for just a little while. I shall be good. It—it’s just that I’m so lonely; besides, today I’m afraid as well. . . .”

  “Afraid?”

  “I’ve had all day the strange feeling that I’ve been followed. I know I’m subject to fancies; but this time I’m almost sure. Twice I caught a glimpse of this man, but each time he hung back or das
hed out of sight around a corner. I know—I can see from your face—that you think I’m imagining things. I swear I am not; and the oddest part about it all, my Jean, is that there was something oddly familiar about this man. . . .”

  “Familiar?” Jean growled.

  “Yes, yes! I know him—I have known him well! He is someone out of my past life, the past I don’t remember; someone I knew longer, and even better, than I knew you; you see, Jeannot, I did not recognise you at first, but this man I recognised instantly. That’s why I want you to stay with me a while, Jean. I’m so terribly afraid!”

  Jean studied her small, oval face. Whether on not she had imagined this man from her past, her fear at least was real.

  “All right,” he growled, and the two of them mounted the stairs.

  The stark poverty of the little room tore at his heart. It was very clean, but it lacked almost every kind of comfort. Nicole moved about, setting before him bread, cheese, even a scrap of meat, and a tall bottle of wine. Jean drank some of the wine, knowing that it at least was plentiful; but the other things he would not touch, rightly guessing that they had been saved for her supper.

  She sat there gazing at him, devouring him with her eyes.

  “Jean,” she whispered, “when are you going to tell me—about me, I mean—about us?”

  “Never,” Jean said quietly. “Perhaps one day you will remember it yourself. I pray God you never do. Not that it was wickedness, but that it was very sad and terrible. You’re better not knowing—little Nicole. . . .”

  She got up and came over to where he sat.

  “But I do know so many things,” she said slowly; “my—my body remembers, not my mind. Let me come near you—like this, and I tingle all over. . . .”

  “Then don’t come near me,” Jean Paul said.

  She stared at him, pain clouding her clear blue eyes.

  “Why do you hate me?” she whispered. “Was it something I did—before?”

  “I don’t hate you,” Jean said gravely. “I was in love with you once. Perhaps I still am. But I have a wife who is one of God’s own angels. You are married to a fine and upright man. What was, is dead and buried. Let’s leave it like that, please. . . .”

  “No,” Nicole said. “I—I cannot, God help me, Jean, I cannot! I am a woman, and morality to a woman is always something she accepts as long as it does not interfere with the way her heart feels. Let it interfere, and she tosses it out the window without a qualm. I love your Fleurette; I—I respect Claude. But I would betray them both this instant if you were to stretch out your hand to me. . . .”

  Jean sat quite still, looking at her.

  “Even though you won’t stretch it out,” she breathed, and sought his mouth blindly, in a kiss so savage, so pain-filled, hungry, that all his evasions were nothing, and less, his big hands coming up against his will, despite his will, and she clinging to him, crying, thrusting her hand inside the rough cloth of his shirt and letting her fingers trail achingly, lingeringly, over his body, caressing each ridge of scar tissue, until he stood up and, moved by something close to pure terror, thrust her aside and ran from the room and down the stairs.

  But he could not go home. The confusion inside his mind and heart drove him on through the dark and twisting streets of Paris under the pitiless stars. He had to be alone. He did not want to consider the matter, or think about his relationship to Fleurette, on his own position in the ghastly travesty that life had become. He did not want to think at all; he wanted merely to be alone, because then, at that moment, the presence of any other person upon earth, loved or hated, or simply not cared about, was intolerable to him. What he needed was the silence and the dim streets and the far stars. Some dim, monastic impulse drove him, and blindly he obeyed it.

  He came back to his own flat late the next morning to find a visitor awaiting him. He stared at the man with dull curiosity, conscious that this face was familiar, but not knowing where in his past to place it until the man spoke.

  “You’re Marin, aren’t you?” the man said. “You shouldn’t leave your flat unlocked. Deuced careless of you. . . .”

  “You waited,” Jean said, “so obviously you’re not a thief.”

  “No,” the man said evenly, “but perhaps a murderer. My name is Julien Lamont, Marquis de Saint Gravert, and I have come to kill you.” Then very quietly he produced a long pistol already cocked, and pointed it straight at Jean Paul’s heart.

  Jean stared at his visitor for a long moment; then, leaning upon his stick, he eased himself down into a chair. Julien Lamont remained still, the pistol steady in his hand.

  Jean let a slow chuckle escape his lips, then he began to laugh, the sound of it mocking, terrible, demonic; and Lamont, hearing it, stared at him in astonishment and dismay, letting the muzzle of the pistol droop a little.

  “Are you mad?” he whispered; but his words came too late, for Jean lashed out suddenly with terrible accuracy and smashed his heavy stick across Lamont’s wrist, sending the pistol spinning across the room.

  “Now,” he said easily, pleasantly, “we can discuss the matter. But first, some wine. I must tender you the hospitality of my house.”

  He got up, walked across the room and retrieved the pistol.

  He eased the hammer down out of cock and, lifting the striking plate, dug the priming powder out. Then he gave the weapon back to Lamont.

  “I don’t think you’ll want to kill me after we’ve talked,” he said quietly, “but God knows you’ll need that pistol in Paris.”

  Then he got the bottle and the glasses down from the cupboard.

  “Why did you laugh?” Lamont demanded.

  “Because your face was familiar,” Jean smiled; “but I didn’t recognise the familiarity until after you introduced yourself. Your face is my own, before this scar. . . .”

  Lamont stared at him, seeing that what he said was true. He took the goblet Jean offered him.

  “Now,” Jean said, “why did you want to kill me?”

  “Because of Nicole. Almost a year ago, Lucienne Talbot told me I was a fool to believe that she had remained faithful to me. I—I thought her dead, but a little before that time a scoundrelly rascal, fallen out of favour here, crossed the border and gave me evidence that she was still alive. When I told Gervais about it, Lucienne laughed and said: ‘Seek her in Paris—for that’s where Jean Paul Marin is. ’”

  “So you came,” Jean said.

  “As soon as I could. It was hellishly difficult. Took me four months to get the necessary forged papers. Another month to get here. The rest of the time I spent searching Paris street by street. I didn’t dare ask questions—my speech, my tone of voice alone would have betrayed me.”

  “But you found her.”

  “Yes, I met her in the street, but she pretended not to recognise me. It was then that I began to believe Lucienne. So I followed her—for days. And yesterday evening I saw her go up with you into her place—and remained. . . .”

  Jean could have heard, had he been less intent upon his visitor, the sound that Fleurette made outside on the landing, where she stood, listening to their voices. It would have been familiar to him. He had heard it many times upon the battlefield. All death rattles—even this soft one in a woman’s throat—sound curiously alike.

  “Why didn’t you come up?” Jean said.

  “I was afraid of what I might find. I knew in my rage I would kill both of you. And I don’t want to kill Nicole. I only want to forgive her and take her back.”

  “Noble of you,” Jean mocked, “but you haven’t actually anything to forgive her for. Had you waited ten minutes, you would have seen me come down again.”

  Why do you lie, oh my husband? Fleurette cried inside her heart. You’re not afraid of him, so why do you lie? All night long—with her—with her! Oh, dear God——

  Then she turned and fled wildly down the stairs, heedless of the fact she could not see.

  “You came down?” Julien breathed, hope in his voice. “Now re
ally, Marin. . . .”

  “Look!” Jean roared at him; “I’ve had enough of this nonsense! Your wife is a sick woman, Lamont. She is not feigning loss of memory—she is today more than half mad. Had you remained at home and protected her and your children as a husband should, she would not be in this state today. For it was seeing your infants murdered that did this thing to her—”

  “Infant Jesus!” Julien wept. “Marin, for God’s love. . . .”

  Jean put out his hand and touched his shoulder.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “That was cruel of me. Your wife is my wife’s best friend. I’ve tried to do all I could to protect and help her—that’s all. I loved her once, long before you married her; but what I feel for her today is—pity.”

  “Forgive me,” Julien Lamont said, “I didn’t know. . . .”

  “But now you do. One word of advice, M. Lamont. Leave Paris at once. The life of a noble is not worth a candle here.”

  “I knew that,” Lamont whispered, “and I risked it. But now more than ever I cannot go until I can take Nicole with me.”

  “Your affair,” Jean shrugged; “but for God’s sake be careful. If you must be guillotined, don’t drag her along with you. We’re very fond of Nicole, my wife and I. . . .”

  “Thank you,” Julien Lamont said, and took Jean’s outstretched hand.

  When, after a sleepless night of waiting, it was dawn at last, Jean got up and went to Pierre’s flat. Marianne opened the door the barest crack and looked at him, contempt written all over her broad face.

  “You!” she spat, “go away from here, Jean Marin! She doesn’t want to see you!”

  “Would you,” Jean said angrily, “have the decency to tell me why?”

  “As if you didn’t know! What some women won’t do to steal another’s husband! And the poor thing blind, at that. Nobility certainly doesn’t help a woman’s morals, does it, Jean Marin? Well, I hope you enjoyed yourself, because it has cost you your wife!”